Legislation/Policy Article from All-Creatures.org

How we investigated the land-grant university system

From Maria Parazo Rose and Clayton Aldern, Grist.org
August 2, 2024

A methodology of our efforts to reveal how land-grant universities continue to profit from stolen Indigenous resources… These policies have had beyond devastating consequences on the billions of animals abused as a result of environmental destruction, university vivisection funding, big ag 'research,' expansion of meat and dairy and egg industries.

History

In 1862, the Morrill Act allowed the federal government to expropriate over 10 million acres of tribal lands from Native communities, selling or developing them in order to fund public colleges. Over time, additional violence-backed treaties and land seizures ceded even more Indigenous lands to these “land-grant universities,” which continue to profit from these parcels.

But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land taken from Indigenous communities to land-grant universities. Over the past year, Grist looked at state trust lands, which are held and managed by state agencies for the schools’ continued benefit, and which total more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres across 21 states. We wanted to know how these acres, also stolen Indigenous land, are being used to fund higher education.

To do this, we needed to construct an original dataset.

• Grist located all state trust lands distributed through state enabling acts that currently send revenue to higher education institutions that also benefited from the Morrill Act.
• We identified their original Indigenous inhabitants and caretakers, and researched how much the United States would have paid for each parcel. The latter is based on an assessment of Indigenous territorial history, according to the U.S. Forest Service, associated with the land the parcels are on.
• We reconstructed more than 8.2 million acres of state trust parcels taken from 123 tribes, bands, and communities through 121 land cessions, a legal term for the surrendering of land. (It is important to note that land cession histories are incomplete and accurate only to the view of U.S. law and historical negotiations, not to Indigenous histories, epistemologies, or historic territories not captured by federal data.)
• The U.S. Forest Service dataset, which is based on the Schedule of Indian Land Cessions compiled by Charles Royce for the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1896-1897), covers the period from 1787 to 1894.

This unique dataset was created through extensive spatial analysis that acquired, cleaned, and analyzed data from state repositories and departments across more than 14 states. We also reviewed historical financial records to supplement the dataset.
This information represents a snapshot of trust land parcels and activity present in November 2023. We encourage exploration of the database and caution that this snapshot is likely very different from state inventories 20, 50, or even 100 years ago. Since, to our knowledge, no other database of this kind exists — with this specific state trust land data benefitting land-grant universities — we are committed to making it publicly available and as robust as possible. 

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE, including:

• History of the 1862 Morrill Act
• Terminology
• Relevant Documents
• Steps of this investigation
• Identify university beneficiaries
• Data acquisition
• Data cleaning
• Dataset merge
• Mapping the land use activity
• Join to USFS Cession data
• Calculate financial information
• Generate summary statistics

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: August 2, 2024
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